He referred them to the exposé in the
St. Petersburg Times that had so shaken
him: "The Truth Rundown." The first
installment had appeared in June, 2009.
Haggis had learned from reading it that
several of the church's top managers had
defected in despair. Marty Rathbun had
once been inspector general of the
church's Religious Technology Center,
which holds the trademarks of Scientol-
ogy and Dianetics, and exists to "protect
the public from misapplication of the
technology." Rathbun had also overseen
Scientology's legal-defense strategy, and
reported directly to Miscavige. Amy Sco-
bee had been an executive in the Celeb-
rity Centre network. Mike Rinder had
been the church's spokesperson, the job
now held by Tommy Davis. One by one,
they had disappeared from Scientology,
and it had never occurred to Haggis to ask
where they had gone.
The defectors told the newspaper that
Miscavige was a serial abuser of his staff
"The issue wasn't the physical pain of it,"
Rinder said. "It's the fact that the dom-
ination you're getting-hit in the face,
kicked-and you can't do anything about
it. If you did try, you'd be attacking the
C.O.B."-the chairman of the board.
Tom De V ocht, a defector who had been
a manager at the Clearwater spiritual cen-
ter, told the paper that he, too, had been
beaten by Miscavige; he said that from
2003 to 2005 he had witnessed Miscavige
striking other staff members as many as a
hundred times. Rathbun, Rinder, and De
V ocht all admitted that they had engaged
in physical violence themselves. "It had
become the accepted way of doing things,"
Rinder said. Amy Scobee said that no-
body challenged the abuse because people
were terrified of Miscavige. Their great-
est fear was expulsion: "You don't have
any money. You don't have job experi-
ence. You don't have anything. And he
coilld put you on the streets and ruin you."
Assessing the truthfulness of such
inflammatory statements-made by peo-
ple who deserted the church or were ex-
pelled-was a challenge for the newspa-
per, which has maintained a special focus
on Scientology. (Clearwater is twenty
miles northwest of downtown St. Peters-
burg.) In 1998, six years before he de-
fected, Rathbun told the paper that he
had never seen Miscavige hit anyone.
Now he said, "That was the biggest lie I
ever told you." The reporters behind "The
Truth Rundown," Joe Childs and Thomas
Tobin, interviewed each defector sepa-
rately and videotaped many of the ses-
sions. "It added a measure of confi-
dence," Childs told me. "Their stories just
tracked."
Much of the alleged abuse took place
at the Gold Base, a Scientology outpost
in the desert near Hemet, a town eighty
miles southeast of Los Angeles. Misca-
vige has an office there, and the site fea-
tures, among other things, movie studios
and production facilities for the church's
many publications. For decades, the basè s
location was unknown even to many
church insiders. Haggis visited the Gold
Base only once, in the early eighties, when
he was about to direct his Scientology
commercial. The landscape, he said, sug-
gested a spa, "beautiful and restful," but he
found the atmosphere sterile and scary.
Surrounded by a security fence, the base
houses about eight hundred Sea Org
members, in quarters that the church lik-
ens to those "in a convent or seminary, al-
beit much more comfortable."
According to a court declaration filed
by Rathbun in Jilly, Miscavige expected
Scientology leaders to instill aggressive,
even violent, discipline. Rathbun said that
he was resistant, and that Miscavige
grew frustrated with him, assigning him
in 2004 to the Hole-a pair of double-
wide trailers at the Gold Base. "There
were between eighty and a hundred peo-
ple sentenced to the Hole at that time,"
Rathbun said, in the declaration. "We
were required to do group confessions all
day and all night."
The church claims that such stories are
false: "There is not, and never has been,
any place of ' confinement' . . . nor is there
anything in Church policy that would
allow such confinement."
According to Rathbun, Miscavige
came to the Hole one evening and an-
nounced that everyone was going to play
musical chairs. Only the last person stand-
ing would be allowed to stay on the base.
He declared that people whose spouses
"were not participants would have their
marriages terminated." The St. Peters-
burg Times noted that Miscavige played
Qyeen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" on a
boom box as the church leaders fought
over the chairs, punching each other and,
in one case, ripping a chair apart.
Tom De Vocht, one of the partici-
pants, says that the event lasted until four
in the morning: "It got more and more
physical as the number of chairs went
down." Many of the participants had long
been cut off from their families. They had
no money, no credit cards, no telephones.
According to De V ocht, many lacked a
driver's license or a passport. Few had any
savings or employment prospects. As peo-
ple fell out of the game, Miscavige had air-
plane reservations made for them. He said
that buses were going to be leaving at six
in the morning. The powerlessness of ev-
eryone else in the room was nakedly clear.
Tommy Davis told me that a musical-
chairs episode did occur. He explained
that Miscavige had been away from the
Gold Base for some time, and when he
returned he discovered that in his absence
many jobs had been reassigned. The game
was meant to demonstrate that even
seemingly small changes can be disruptive
to an organization-underscoring an "ad-
ministrative policy of the church." The
rest of the defectors' accounts, Davis told
me, was "hoo- hà': "Chairs being ripped
apart, and people being threatened that
theyre going to be sent to far-flung places
in the world, plane tickets being pur-
chased, and they re going to force their
spouses-and on and on and on. I mean,
it's just nuts!"
Jefferson Hawkins, a former Sea Org
member and church executive who
worked with Haggis on the rejected Di-
anetics ad campaign, told me that Misca-
vige had struck or beaten him on five oc-
casions, the first time in 2002. "I had just
written an infomercial," he said. Miscavige
summoned him to a meeting where a few
dozen members were seated on one side
of a table; Miscavige sat by himself on the
other side. According to Hawkins, Mis-
cavige began a tirade about the ad's short-
comings. Hawkins recalls, 'Without any
warning, he jumped up onto the confer-
ence-room table and he launches himself
at me. He knocks me back against a cubi-
cle wall and starts battering my face." The
two men fell to the floor, Hawkins says,
and their legs became entangled. "Let go
of my legs!" Miscavige shouted. Accord-
ing to Hawkins, Miscavige then "stomped
out of the room," leaving Hawkins on the
floor, shocked and bruised. The others
did nothing to support him, he claims:
" Th . ' G , G f' "
ey were saYIng, et up. et up.
I asked Hawkins why he hadn't called
the police. He reminded me that church
members believe that Scientology holds
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 14 & 21, 2011 101